Full Assault Mode (3 page)

“Maybe we should roll up and squeeze those donkeys,” Kolt said, watching as the animals finished their afternoon delight and set off on a path that would intersect with the column of armored vehicles. “Did they get a good look at those animals?” Kolt asked Slapshot, knowing he had an earbud in while monitoring the Thunder Turtle radio transmissions.

“Yeah, Racer,” Slapshot said. “Just three run-of-the-mill donkeys. Nothing strapped to them, and there’s no way they’d get enough explosives in them and have them move around like that.”

“Rog, I guess not,” Kolt said, growing uneasy all the same as the donkeys wandered down from their rocky rendezvous and out onto the road being cleared. The Huskies, fifty yards away, slowed, not that you could really tell.

The lead Buffalo edged over to the right side of the road, no doubt because of the top gunner’s begging to get in a shot at the animals, at least to scare them off. The image on the flat screen blossomed into a roiling white cloud, obscuring the entire column.

“Fuck!” Kolt shouted, gripping the water bottle so hard it cracked, spilling the tobacco juice over his fingers. As the cloud dispersed, the Buffalo could be seen nose down in a large crater a full five yards wide.

“Damn, that one is gonna hurt,” Digger said, easing forward until his nose almost touched the screen. “The Buffalo looks intact, I mean, probably lost the right front wheel, but the tub looks solid. Any casualties, Slapshot?”

“Stand by. They’re trying to unfuck it now.”

Slapshot was bent over, his right hand pressed against his ear as he listened in. He looked up a half minute later. “No criticals or KIAs. Driver probably has a broken ankle, and the rest are pretty banged up, but otherwise they’re good to go.”

Kolt relaxed. A thousand yards behind this column was a second one composed of three more Buffalos and a pair of twenty-nine-ton MRVs, mine-resistant recovery vehicles. They were essentially wreckers on steroids, each heavily armored and sporting a huge thirty-ton lifting boom in addition to recovery and drag winches. Thunder Turtle might not be fast, but it was well prepared.

The second explosion marked the last moments on earth of the three donkeys.

“Damn, the donkeys were rigged. Triggerman must have gotten jumpy and hit the button too soon,” Slapshot said.

Kolt was about to agree when tracer fire crisscrossed the screen. A lot of tracer fire. Several smaller explosions appeared among the column of armored vehicles. One appeared on top of a Buffalo. Several secondary explosions from within the Buffalo followed, ripping the armored beast to shreds.

“They’re dumpin’ mags and frags,” Kolt said, confirming to the others that they’d met their trigger to launch.

“Christ, it looks like they landed a mortar round right through the gunner’s hatch!” Slapshot said as he scrambled out of his bunk.

Kolt was already racing out the door. “We launch in ten!”

TWO

“Kit up!” Kolt shouted, already moving to the door to get back to the ready room.

Slapshot held up a hand as the men of Bravo Team began to move. “I’ve been keeping tabs on the flight status, and we’re in for a wait. They launched the ready birds an hour ago on some support mission for the ANF. And then a CASEVAC flight took fire and one of their Black Hawks declared lame duck and had to sit down. Flight ops launched two Black Hawks to assist. They are saying it’ll take at least an hour to get a couple more preflighted and spooled up.”

Kolt stopped and turned to face Slapshot. “I don’t care if they have to use duct tape and rubber bands, but I want another Black Hawk ready.”

“On it, boss!” Slapshot said as Kolt left the tent, the rest of Bravo Team in his wake.

He ignored the cold as he quickly trudged across the compound to the ready room. He started to bitch about the half-baked planning that had left Thunder Turtle in this predicament, but he stopped himself before he got worked up. Recriminations could, and did, come later. Right now, he had to focus; he had to get switched on.

Kolt stepped through the door and made his way to his plywood cubicle at the far end of the room. He chose that spot because it let him look over his mates as they got ready. If anything, or anyone, was having trouble or having second thoughts, he’d spot it. He quickly began the ritual his muscles knew by heart. It didn’t matter if it was training or the real deal like tonight, kitting up was always done the same, and with intense focus. It was a bit like a superstitious ball player who always laced up his cleats the same way while chewing four pieces of spearmint gum, tapped his cleats with the bat barrel, or opened and closed the Velcro on his batting gloves between each pitch. The big difference in a Delta operator’s case, however, was that lives, not batting averages, were on the line.

Kolt took a moment to survey his kit, making sure everything was where he placed it after the last mission out the door. Sitting upright in the middle of the cubicle were his assault vest and body-armor plates, which, like a Roman soldier’s breastplate, were heavy and sturdy. They didn’t shine, but they were impressive all the same.

His rifles and hoolie tool were leaning against the back of the cubicle, rifles muzzle up with the Magpul rifle magazines loaded and stacked neatly against the sidewall. His tactical tan Gen4 Glock 23 pistol sat unloaded on its side with tan hard-ball-loaded magazines next to it. Handheld OD green smoke canisters, thermite grenades, frag grenades, and nine-bangers were stacked on top of each other in cardboard boxes. It wasn’t pretty, but it was practical, and after all these years it still brought a smile to Kolt’s face.

His two radios in their chargers blinked green, indicating fully charged batteries. The quickest way for a Delta troop commander to step on it was to launch with tits-up radios. To Kolt, that was almost as bad as having a weapon with no ammo. If you couldn’t communicate with your assaulters or snipers on target, you weren’t leading shit.

Spare batteries for everything from the weapon optics to NVGs to GPS to Peltor (ear pro) were neatly taped or otherwise secured to the appropriate piece of gear or stuffed in a pocket on the vest. Door charges, both rubber-strip charges and an eighty-four-inch ECT charge, were rolled neatly and secured with a rubber band. Fuse igniters were on the opposite side of the charges until ready to be connected. Kolt made sure to put the igniters in pockets opposite the strips, just to be extra safe.

He paused, letting his eyes unfocus as he listened to the bustle of Bravo Team kit up. This wasn’t the loud, flashy scene of a sports team. The men were quiet, their conversations low and to the point. Hollywood and the moviegoing public would definitely be disappointed if they saw this. Satisfied that shit was straight, Kolt patted his left shoulder pocket, making sure there was at least a third of a pouch of Red Man tobacco there. He also felt the CAT tourniquet and hoped he wouldn’t need it again. Letting his hand slide down his body, he felt in his left trouser pouch for the silk escape-and-evade map of the surrounding area, along with three hundred dollars in gold coins and his “blood chit,” written in a half-dozen local languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, Russian, and Hindi. In the age of jihad, you had no idea whom you might run into, and depending on their affiliation, the prevailing winds, and the mood of whatever god they prayed to, it could all go south in the blink of an eye. Gold, however, had a tendency to put a twinkle in any man’s eye.

Kolt unfastened his black nylon utility belt and retucked his shirt into his Crye combat trousers before retightening his belt. Next, he secured the looped end of his elastic safety line to his belt buckle and ran the nylon around his waist before securing the snap-link end to the belt loop in his lower back area. In the event of a helo crash, hard landing, or abrupt maneuvers by the pilot of whatever aircraft he was in, Kolt was assured he’d ride that baby all the way to the ground, as long as he clipped in.

He heard the door to the ready room open and the sound of running boots. Slapshot arrived, a smile on his red-bearded face. “We got a bird! We launch in six minutes!”

“Good deal,” Kolt said, before thinking about Master Sergeant Jason “Slapshot” Holcomb’s physical condition. It had been about a year since the two of them had wrecked the Durango SUV during a high-speed chase of Daoud al-Amriki in northern Mexico. Slapshot took the brunt of it, leaving him with a broken cheekbone and left arm, as well as massive internal injuries. He spent six months in a medically induced coma, and nobody was entirely sure he would pull through.

“You wanna sit this one out, Jason?” Kolt asked.

“Kiss my ass, Racer,” Slapshot shot right back. “If I wanted to sit it out, I would have stayed in Fayetteville and been closing down Huske’s Hardware House about now.”

“Your call, bro.”

Kolt nodded his approval and went back to his kit. He didn’t want to launch without his troop sergeant major, but he wanted to be sure Slapshot was good with it. Putting the thought behind him, Kolt picked up his call-sign patches with their luminous letters and affixed them to the Velcro on his shoulder pockets. He bent down and picked up his assault vest by the shoulder pads and spun it around. He pushed on the CamelBak water-reservoir sleeve to ensure it was full and then lifted the vest over his head, sliding his arms through the armholes. He grabbed the Fastek buckles on either side and connected them before pulling the running nylon ends tight to snug them to his body. He wondered if all those centuries ago Roman centurions experienced the same reaction he did when the armor went on. He suspected they did.

Kolt grabbed his two MBITR AN/PRC-148 radios, pulling them from their chargers and checking to ensure the frequency of the one he placed inside the radio pouch on the left side of his vest was on the troop internal net, or lower frequency, while the one he slid into his right-side pouch was set for the upper squadron command frequency.

“I could be an astronaut after this gig,” Slapshot said, scrambling into his gear.

“Astronauts eat powdered food, Slapshot. You’d suck at it,” Digger said.

Kolt hadn’t thought about that, but with all the kit they strapped on, it did remind him a bit of the suit-up procedures he’d seen on documentaries before a space walk. He brought the mouthpiece of his CamelBak up to his lips and took a sip. Flat, warm water entered his mouth. He knew some guys put in Gatorade and even Red Bull, but he was old-school, and plain old H
2
0 was his drink of choice when turning targets.

“They’re still swapping fire,” Slapshot said, monitoring Thunder Turtle’s firefight while getting dressed. “RPGs, mortars, and AKs. And … ah, shit! It’s starting to snow.”

The ready room got quieter. “How bad?” Kolt asked, amazed how easily Slapshot could see that a thermal screen. Despite all the tech and all the advances, snow was still a bitch to fly in. If it got too bad, the bird wouldn’t be cleared to take off.

“Not a lot, but it’s only going to get worse.”

Kolt cursed under his breath. “This just gets better and better.” He turned back to his cubicle and grabbed two mini frag grenades and two nine-bangers from the box and placed them in the pouch custom sewn over his soft-armor V-shaped groin pad. A dozen years ago, the first time he did that, he felt a bit queasy, but now he didn’t think twice about it.

He picked up his tan 5.56mm thirty-round Magpul magazines and placed them into the four single-mag pouches on his stomach, bullets down and facing to the right to facilitate a fast mag change with his rifle. He left one mag on the shelf for his rifle. Grabbing the two extra .40mm fifteen-round Glock 23 mags, he put them in the two pistol-mag pouches, again, bullets down and facing to the right.

“How’s Thunder Turtle?” Kolt asked, fitting his Peltor ear protection in place over his long brown hair. He pressed the
ON
button on the rear of the right earpiece and then clapped several times close to his ear to ensure they worked properly. They did.

“Holding their own, but they’ve got three seriously wounded,” Slapshot said. “A Pedro flight has been launched, but they won’t get clearance to land until the LZ is safe. They’re already talking about loading the wounded and driving them, but that would take hours.”

“Then we need to be airborne ASAP,” Kolt said, routing the Peltor radio cables through the Velcro fasteners and attaching the push-to-talk to the nonfiring shoulder area of his vest.

The door to the ready room burst open. “Helo is ready in three mikes!”

Kolt picked up his Glock 23 and power stroked it three times, bringing the slide to the rear firmly each time to ensure the pistol was unloaded and spread the thin lube across the slide grooves. He raised the pistol and put the front site on a one-by-one-inch piece of black tape on the wall to his front and dry-fired the trigger. In one fluid motion, he inserted a magazine of .40mm, power stroked the slide to allow the first bullet to move into the chamber, and then thumbed the mag release and dropped the magazine into his off hand. He set the pistol in his holster, inserted another round into the mag to top it off, and then unholstered and fully seated the mag until he heard and felt the distinct click. Then he holstered the pistol again.

Kolt reached for his helmet, patting the subdued American flag attached with Velcro to the right side and the call-sign patch affixed to the rear. He turned the helmet over and smiled at the picture he carried of his grandfather during World War II in its webbing. It was comforting to have his grandfather looking over him. He flipped the helmet right-side up and pressed down on the IR glint tape to make sure it was firmly attached, then placed the helmet over his Peltors and fastened the chin strap.

He pressed the release to lower his NVGs in front of his eyes to make sure they activated automatically and that the compass function set itself. Satisfied, he raised the NVGs back up, locking them into place, then removed the black plastic dust covers from the ends of the two lenses and placed them on the shelf.

He paused, taking a deep breath and then slowly exhaling. Focus was the key. Details mattered. Rushing around like a chicken with its head cut off would get you a similar fate. Centered and calm, Kolt reached for his HK416 rifle, thumbed the selector switch, and then put two fingers on the charging handle and pulled it to the rear three times to ensure the weapon was clear. He knew it would be, but he did it anyway. You always checked a weapon when you picked it up, always.